House Science Chair likes CO2

SUBHEAD: Global Warming is good as it melts Arctic Ocean and gives shipping access.

By Chris D'Angelo on 24 July 2017 for Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lamar-smith-climate-change-beneficial_us_59765a54e4b0e201d577466d)


Image above: San Antonio Express articel says Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) is raising concerns about alleged Russian funding of U.S. environmental activism. Is that the right Russian meddling to focus on? Photo by Bob Owen. From (http://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion/editorials/article/Smith-s-Russia-concerns-miss-the-mark-11300535.php).

Rep. Lamar Smith (Republican-Texas) — who has spent his career cozying up to fossil fuel interests, dismissing the threat of climate change and harassing federal climate scientists — is now arguing that pumping the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide is “beneficial” to global trade, crop production and the lushness of the planet.

Rather than buying into “hysteria,” Americans should be celebrating the plus sides of a changing climate, Smith argues in an op-ed published Tuesday in The Daily Signal, a news website published by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Smith — who has used his power as chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology to push his anti-science views — kicks off his op-ed by claiming Americans’ perception of the phenomenon is “too often determined by their hearing just one side of the story.”

“The benefits of a changing climate are often ignored and under-researched,” Smith said. “Our climate is too complex and the consequences of misguided policies too harsh to discount the positive effects of carbon enrichment.”

Increased carbon dioxide, Smith writes, promotes photosynthesis, resulting in a “greater volume of food production and better quality food” and “lush vegetation” that “assists in controlling water runoff, provides more habitats for many animal species, and even aids in climate stabilization, as more vegetation absorbs more carbon dioxide.” Warmer temperatures, he notes, results in longer growing seasons

Smith goes as far as to make a case for why a rapidly melting Arctic, which scientists warn could cost tens of trillions of dollars by the end of this century, is a positive thing.

“Also, as the Earth warms, we are seeing beneficial changes to the earth’s geography,” he writes. “For instance, Arctic sea ice is decreasing. This development will create new commercial shipping lanes that provide faster, more convenient, and less costly routes between ports in Asia, Europe, and eastern North America. This will increase international trade and strengthen the world economy.”

The op-ed comes roughly two months after Smith led a group of lawmakers on what BuzzFeed described as a “secret tour of the melting Arctic.” The unpublicized, weeklong, multi-stop outing included meeting with climate scientists and learning about how they track the levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, according to BuzzFeed.

While Smith reportedly canceled an interview with BuzzFeed to discuss the trip, Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.) told the publication that he and Smith had productive discussions about the climate.

Monday’s op-ed would suggest that, while Smith may have accepted the reality of the threat, he’s opted for the when-life-gives-you-lemons-make-lemonade approach.

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University who sparred with Smith during a March hearing on climate science, told HuffPost via email that “it is clear” Smith is “slowly advancing through the stages of denial ... having apparently now moved from ‘it’s not happening,’ to ’ok—it’s happening, but IT WILL BE GOOD FOR US!”

“One step at a time I suppose,” Mann wrote, “but at least there is some apparent progress toward the truth (that climate change is real, human-caused, and already a problem).”

Joseph Kopser, an aerospace engineer and Army veteran from Austin, Texas, is one of several Democratic candidates vying for a chance to unseat the 16-term Republican in the 2018 midterm election. Reach Monday by phone, Kopser described Smith’s op-ed as “stunning.” And he said it is “exactly” what the late English author George Orwell warned about in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

“He is acknowledging the warming planet,” Kopser said. “And he’s trying to use Orwellian speak to say that, ’No, no, no — These terrible things that scientists have talked about and proven and explained why they are terrible for our planet, are actually good things.”

What Smith is doing, Kopser said, is “equivalent to telling somebody who’s in a flood, ‘Oh no no, all this water is going to be great. Just think how much more drinking water you’re going to have available.’ Or somebody in a burning house, “No no, think, you now no longer need a furnace because you have this wonderful heat source all around your house.’”

First elected in 1986, Smith is the 14th longest-serving member of the current U.S. House. The San Antonio native has received more than $700,000 from the oil and gas industry over those years. In his five years as chairman of the science committee, he has worked to defund climate research and harassed federal climate scientists, whom he has accused of playing “fast and loose” with data. He has also sprinted to defend the fossil fuel industry ― namely Exxon Mobil Corp. ― from investigations into their own records on climate change and used his power to stack hearings with coal and chemical lobbyists and climate skeptics.

Burning fossil fuels, Smith writes in his op-ed, has “helped raise the standard of living for billions of people.”

“The use of fossil fuels and the byproducts of carbon enrichment play a large role in advancing the quality of human life by increasing food production to feed our growing population, stimulating the economy, and alleviating poverty.

Bad deals like the Paris Agreement would cost the U.S. billions of dollars, a loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, and have no discernible impact on global temperatures. Instead of succumbing to fear tactics and exaggerated predictions, we should instead invest in research and technology that can help us better understand the effects of climate change.”

Smith is among a trio of Republicans that nonprofit political action committee 314 Action is targeting for their anti-science views. Smith’s office did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment Monday.

In a statement Monday, 314 Action founder Shaughnessy Naughton blasted Smith’s op-ed as the latest of his “industry-funded attacks on scientific consensus around the issue” of climate change.

“Rather than playing the hits to the Heritage Foundation’s mouthpiece, I challenge Mr. Smith to explain the benefits of climate change to the displaced people of Isle de Jean Charles or Tangier Island,” said Naughton, referring to two U.S. islands vanishing as ocean levels rise. “If climate scientists can’t convince him, maybe our country’s first climate refugees can.”

• Chris D'Angelo is a journalist for Huffington Post and a former reporter for Kauai's Garden Island News.
.

Global Warming clobbers Ocean Life

SOURCE: Katherine Muzik PHD (kmuzik@gmail.com)
SUBHEAD: These die-offs are different, much different. All-out alarm is warranted with bells clanging!

By Robert Hunziker on 16 January 2016 for Counter Punch -
(http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/16/global-warming-clobbers-ocean-life/)


Image above: Scientists measuring thinness of ice in the Arctic around meltponds. From (https://fossilfreeri.org/2015/07/26/science-risk-and-morality/).

The waters of the Pacific off the California coast are transparently clear. Problem is: Clear water is a sign that the ocean is turning into desert (Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA).

From Alaska to Central America, and beyond, sea life has been devastated over the past three years like never before. Is it Fukushima, or nature running its own course, or some kind of perverse wrath emanating from global warming? For a hint, scientists refer to the lethal ocean warming over the past few years as “the Warm Blob.”

After all, global warming hits the ocean much, much harder than land. Up to 90% of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming is absorbed by the ocean, which is fortuitous for humans.

Just imagine the chaos if the situation were reversed: Mobs of regular ole people morphing into maddened gangs striving for food, huddled in far northern latitudes while Mid America scorches brittle crops in sandy soil, a dystopian lifestyle.

“Upper ocean heat content has increased significantly over the past two decades” (Source: Climate Change: Ocean Heat Content, NOAA, Climate.gov, July 14, 2015). More than 3,000 Argo floats strategically positioned worldwide measure ocean temps every 10 days.

Scientists classify the Warm Blob phenomenon as “multi-year ocean heat waves,” with temperatures 7° F above normal and up to 10°F above normal in extreme cases. How would humans handle temperatures, on average, 7° to 10°F above normal? There’d be mass migrations from Florida to Alaska, for sure.

As it happens, sea animals do not do well. They die in unbelievably massive numbers; all across the ocean… the animal die-offs are unprecedented. Scientists are stunned!

After years of horrendous worldwide sea animal die-offs, 2016 was a banner year. Is this out of the ordinary? Sadly, the answer is: Yes.

The numbers are simply staggering, not just in the Pacific, but around the world, e.g., the following is but a partial list during only one month (December 2016):

Tens of thousands of dead starfish beached in Netherlands;
Six-thousand dead fish in Maryland waterway;
Ten tons of dead fish in Brazilian river;
Tens of thousands of dead fish wash up on Cornwall, England beach;
Schools of dead herring in Nova Scotia;
One 100 tons of fish suddenly dead in Indonesia;
Massive fish deaths ‘state of calamity’ in Philippines;
Thousands of dead crayfish float down river in New Zealand;
Masses of dead starfish, crabs, and fish wash ashore in Nova Scotia, and there are more and more….

In fact, entire articles are written about specific areas of massive die offs, for example: “Why Are Chilean Beaches Covered With Dead Animals?” Smithsonian.com, May 4, 2016. Chilean health officials had to resort to heavy machinery to remove 10,000 dead rotting squid from coastlines earlier in the 2016 year.

Over 300 whale carcasses hit the beaches and 8,000 tons of sardines and 12% of the annual salmon catch… all found dead on beaches, to name only a few! You’ve gotta wonder why?

According to Nate Mantua, research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, California: “One of the things that is clear is there’s a lot of variation from year to year along the Pacific Coast, and some of that is tied into natural patterns, like El Niño,’ Mantua said. ‘But what we saw in 2014, ‘15 and the first part of ‘16 was warmer than anything we’ve seen in our historical records, going back about 100 years” (Mary Callahan, Year in Review: Ocean Changes Upend North Coast Fisheries, The Press Democrat, Dec. 25, 2016).

Fishermen bitterly claim the ocean is changing like never before. Meanwhile, scientists study those weird changes but do not fully understand the problem.

Unfortunately, the general public does not see changes hidden within water; otherwise, they, the general public, might organize and demand their politicians in Washington, D.C. fight climate change/global warming.

According to John Largier, professor of coastal oceanography at UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory, “Climate change syndrome is definitely having an impact,” Ibid.

As it happens, the world climate system is interconnected, interwoven such that climatic stress originated at sea spills onto land, e.g., the Warm Blob was first observed and linked to a high-pressure ridge stationed over the north Pacific in 2011.

 This ridge diverted winter storms, thereby exacerbating California’s drought meanwhile weakening winds that ordinarily absorb ocean heat and stir up the cold water necessary for immensely productive Northern Coast breeding grounds for marine wildlife.

Morosely, too-warm ocean water serves as breeding ground for the infamous deadly “red tide,” a bloom of single-celled organism that thrives in warmer waters, producing a neurotoxin called domoic acid, resulting in enormous numbers of sea lion fatalities and massive destruction of Dungeness crab fisheries and all kinds of other trouble.

Too-warm water also contributes to the collapse of bull kelp forests, which are the ocean’s equivalent of the tropical rain forest; meanwhile, purple urchins thrive and multiply in explosive fashion in the poisonous environment, devouring remaining plant life. Thereby, out-competing hapless red abalone, the shellfish that people love.

Collapsing food chains are evident up and down the Pacific Coast earmarked by large die offs of Cassin Auklets, a tiny seabird, as well as massive numbers of Common Murres. The sea lions and fur seals suffer from starvation and domoic acid poisoning. In early 2013 scientists declared the sea lion die-off an “unusual mortality event.”

Nursing sea lion mothers are unable to find enough forage like sardines and anchovies. Pups, searching for food, strand on beaches filled with curious sunbathers with a natural proclivity to cuddle the hapless cuties that could easily result in fierce attacks. As it happens, lifeguards run along sandy beaches warning beachcombers beware!

Still, wildlife die-offs are an ancient phenomenon, mentioned by Aristotle in his Historia Animalium (4th Century B.C.). In the U.S. in 1884, hundreds of tons of dead fish bellied up in lakes around Madison, Wisconsin. This knowledge of the past gives one pause when considering whether an all-out alarm is warranted this time around. After all, isn’t it nature’s way?

No, this time it is different, much different. The all-out alarm is warranted with bells clanging! Yes, of course part of nature’s cycle over the eons involves wildlife die-offs. That’s nature, but nowadays nature is out-of-whack! Ring the bells; blast the sirens!

As published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Recent Shifts in the Occurrence, Cause, and Magnitude of Animal Mass Events, Vol. 112, no. 4, Aug. 5, 2014) it was found that worldwide animal die-offs are increasing in both number and magnitude, even after statistically correcting for the fact that mass deaths are now more likely to be documented than in the past.

“Every biologist I spoke with who is researching mass-mortality events said that many wildlife die-offs today really could be signals of serious problems with the ecological fundamentals of the planet” (Source: J.B. MacKinnon, On Animal Deaths and Human Anxieties, The New Yorker, April 21, 2015). That is the worst possible news you can ever hear.

As for only one example amongst many, the typical number of bird deaths per reported die-off was about 100 in the 1940s. Today it is 10,000 and reported much more frequently than 75 years ago.

Bottom line, the ocean ecosystem is under fierce attack, and it is real, very real indeed with too much global warming, too much ag runoff, too much heavy-duty massive overfishing, likely too much nuclear radiation.

The ocean absorbs anthropogenic CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, similar to the upper atmospheric   The ocean absorbs 90% of the heat that is generated CO2.  Thank your lucky stars for that… but only temporarily!

There is deadly acidification in the ocean caused by excessive CO2 concentrations (already damaging pteropods at the base of the marine food chain).

As stated by the Environmental Defense Fund: “Oceans are at the Brink”- For decades, the ocean has been absorbing carbon dioxide (CO2) dumped into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. It has absorbed a lot of the extra heat produced by elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. But even the ocean has limits!

Going forward, how will the Trump administration confront this messy, possibly fatal and very complex situation, since fossil fuels are the main driver behind climate change/global warming?

Will the Trump administration initiate a nationwide renewable energy plan, similar to Communist China? Accordingly: (Michael Forsythe, China Aims to Spend at Least $360 Billion on Renewable Energy by 2020, New York Times, January 5, 2017)

.

Climate Chaos

SUBHEAD: As the North Pole melts in November and wildfires rage Across USA well into winter.

By Dahr Jamail on 12 December 2016 for Truth Out -
(http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38689-as-north-pole-melts-in-november-wildfires-rage-across-us-well-into-winter)


Image above: Flames along the south side of California State Route 138 in Phelan, California, on August 17, 2016. As climate disruption intensifies, wildfires will be burning well into winter. Photo by Andrew Cullen for The New York Times. From original article.

This is the first anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) dispatch to be written since the election, which heralded the arrival of a president-elect who will become the only western leader who is an ACD denier.

While President Obama remained clearly in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, with his unwillingness to take the radical actions necessary to mitigate (if even nominally) the already-dire impacts of ACD, he was, at least, willing to admit we live in a crisis never seen before.

As if underscoring the specter of Trump -- and Obama's failure to take appropriate measures, as the proverbial Titanic gurgles ever downward -- the Arctic has been especially warm over the last few weeks. During the second half of November, temperatures at the North Pole were a shocking 36 degrees warmer than normal.

During a time when winter usually sets in and the Arctic sea ice freezes up, ice has been melting instead of freezing. Temperatures in late November were akin to what they normally are at the end of August.

It was Gaia sending yet another unmistakable message, and it was profound enough that Bob Henson with the WeatherUnderground said, "There are weather and climate records, and then there are truly exceptional events that leave all others in the dust. Such has been the case across Earth's high latitudes during this last quarter of 2016."

For perspective, add 36 degrees to whatever your weather is right now, wherever you are. How normal is that? Think about how plants and animals in your area would or wouldn't adapt to that. What would happen to your food and water supply?

To give you another idea of how dramatically things have already changed in the Arctic as the region is in the midst of an ecological disintegration, Captain Cook's records of the region from 1778 reveal a literally different world. His expedition was stopped from sailing north of the Bering Strait by "ice which was as compact as a Wall and seemed to be ten or twelve feet high at least," according to the captain's journal.

In continued attempts to sail further north, Cook's ships followed this ice edge all the way to Siberia, but to no avail.

Meanwhile, back in the 21st century, longtime climate scientists are emphasizing that we're currently seeing an unprecedented situation.

Two days after it was revealed that temperatures at the North Pole were 36 degrees above normal, Walt Meier, a research scientist with the Cryospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, who has tracked sea ice data going back to 1979, announced, "It looks like, since the beginning of October, that for the first time we are seeing both the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice running at record low levels."

According to a recent report by the World Meteorological Organization, Earth is now on track to hit 1.2 degrees Celsius hotter than preindustrial temperatures before the end of this year.

According to the recently released annual "Emissions Gap Report" from the UN's Environmental Program (UNEP), current Paris Climate Agreement emissions cuts will still result in 3.5C of planetary warming by 2100. "Current commitments will reduce emissions by no more than a third of the levels required by 2030 to avert disaster," two UNEP leaders warned in the report's introduction.

Recently published research in a prestigious scientific journal shows that ACD is likely already progressing so rapidly that scientists are warning it could well already be "game over." Because the research shows that Earth's climate could be far more sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously believed, they are warning of a temperature rise that is on the "apocalyptic side of bad:" more than 7C within one lifetime from now.

Less importantly, but still shocking and useful to consider (especially since plenty of people seem to believe economics are more important than a habitable planet): Another recent report estimates that the world economy will lose $12 trillion due to ACD damages alone.

A recent report in Bloomberg News lays out the fact that Americans around the US (Florida, Louisiana, East Coast island areas, Alaska, etc.) are already being forced to move due to ACD impacts like storms, erosion and rising seas.

Meanwhile, the global immigration crisis caused by ACD continues apace. A recent report shows that global military leaders have warned of an "unimaginable" global refugee crisis if business as usual persists, and, of course, there is no real sign of it abating.

Brig. Gen. Stephen Cheney, a member of the US Department of State's foreign affairs policy board and CEO of the American Security Project, said, "We're already seeing migration of large numbers of people around the world because of food scarcity, water insecurity and extreme weather, and this is set to become the new normal."

An example of this within the US comes in the form of record-setting wildfires that have been burning across vast swaths of the southeast well into November. You'll find more on this below in the "Fire" section, but it's crucial to note that one of the wildfires scorching Tennessee is the largest in a century, and perhaps in the history of record-keeping. At least a dozen people have died across the southeast from the November wildfires, which are continuing to burn at the time of this writing.

The overview of the oceans continues to grow ever more bleak.

A recent report indicates that ocean life is literally suffocating from low oxygen levels caused by ACD. The report shows that oceans, coastal seas, estuaries, and many rivers and lakes are experiencing dramatic declines in dissolved oxygen levels, and this phenomenon is occurring at a global level now.

As a whole, 2016 has been bleak news for anyone interested in the future of the planet. The World Meteorological Organization recently announced that this year is already "very likely" to be the world's warmest ever. 2015 was the previous hottest year on record, and at that time it was the hottest year since record-keeping began.

Earth
Die-offs of planetary flora and fauna continue to increase in scope and frequency.
A recent report revealed how rising sea levels are pushing saltwater further into US wetlands across the coastal southeast, as well as along parts of the east coast, killing trees from Florida all the way up to New Jersey.

Meanwhile in California, a US Forest Service official recently called the ongoing die-off of what is now over 100 million trees there "unprecedented," and blamed the brunt of it on the ongoing ACD-fueled drought afflicting that state.

Similarly, a recent study published in the journal Global Change Biology showed that yellow cedars in Alaska and British Columbia, trees that can live for 1,000 years, are now dying off over vast areas due to warming from ACD.

Trees across 1,500 square miles are now undergoing a die-off linked directly to ACD, and the forecast for them is grim, since approximately half of the forested area that is currently considered suitable for the yellow cedars will no longer be so by 2100 due to ongoing temperature rise and shifting of winter precipitation from snow to rainfall.

Another disturbing report showed that the world has hundreds of millions fewer birds than it did just a few decades ago, thanks to ACD impacts, dwindling habitat, hunters and pollution.

In the Arctic region of Russia, more than 80,000 reindeer have died as a result of retreating Arctic sea ice.

In a massive new study in the journal Nature, scores of international authors have documented a climate "feedback loop" that they say will likely make ACD considerably worse in upcoming decades. The study addresses the soil-carbon loop in the climate system, which deals primarily with Earth's soils.

Soils store a massive amount of carbon in their plants, and the roots of plants that have lived and died there. Scientists have long since warned that as warming increases, microorganisms living in soils would naturally respond by increasing their respiration rates, a process that then releases more CO2 or methane into the atmosphere. The new study shows that this process is already happening.

Water
As usual, the impacts of ACD across the planet are the most pronounced and obvious in the watery realms (which are increasingly losing their water).

A recently published study showed that, due to dramatically changed vegetation across the Mediterranean region, Spain could be a desert by the year 2100.

Across Africa, ongoing drought is destabilizing countries as it persists. It is the worst drought in 35 years, and has left more than 21 million people in need of food assistance. Unfortunately, yet not surprisingly, the United Nation's Special Envoy Macharia Kamau told journalists in Mozambique recently, "The crisis has yet to peak."

Drought continues plaguing large sections of China. In one region, China's largest freshwater lake is rapidly turning into prairie, as it has neared low-level lines nearly two months earlier than it has done historically.

Meanwhile in Bolivia, President Evo Morales has told people to "prepare for the worst" as the small Andean Mountain country is wracked by a historic drought. Reservoirs that supply water to Bolivia's largest city are now nearly empty.

The drought is primarily fueled by vanishing glaciers across the country, which are a key supplier of water during the dry season. Of course, the glaciers are melting away at record rates due primarily to ACD.

Closer to home, in Utah, recent NASA satellite imagery reveals that the Great Salt Lake is drying up rapidly, as five years of drought have seen the lake's area decrease by 40 percent.

Meanwhile, yet another study was published recently tying US western states' record low snowpack to ACD.

The climate has warmed so much in Canada, that the city of Montreal has invested $7.3 million to save its ice skating rinks. Incredibly, the money will be used to buy refrigerated ice skating rinks.

Looking further north, Russia, China and other countries are rapidly stepping up plans to exploit melting Arctic sea ice by making preparations for their large cargo ships to use the soon-to-be new shipping lanes. Once shipping begins, it will only be a matter of time before the inevitable environmental disasters start to occur in the Arctic.

In Antarctica things continue to worsen, as odd rifts in the middle of the ice shelf of that continent's Pine Island Glacier might be a sign of a new mechanism that could lead to that glacier's collapse, as well as the collapse of other glaciers.

Sea level rise continues apace. A recently published study shows us that ACD is set to cause the most rapid of sea level rise ever experienced in human history, which will make it challenging, to say the least, for megacities on the coasts to adapt. So far, several island and coastal towns facing sea level rise in the far north have had to relocate entirely.

On that note, the first female head of a Pacific Island nation, Hilda Heine of the Marshall Islands, recently told the press that ACD is a "matter of life and death" for her country.

Lastly in this section, a sign of things to come: In the wake of Hurricane Matthew, the town of Nichols, South Carolina was damaged so heavily by flooding that it is an open question as to whether it will be rebuilt at all.

Fire
Wildfires across the US continued to burn far into November, another sign of how far along we are, in terms of ACD impacts. Increasingly, there is no longer a contained wildfire "season," as the planet continues to warm apace.

From the southern US all the way up to New England, November saw fires burning across the country.

Meteorologist Stu Ostro spoke of "surreal" smoke across Atlanta, Georgia; while in Chattanooga, Tennessee hundreds of people were hospitalized from smoke inhalation, while air quality alerts were issued across the Carolinas and Georgia.

By late November, thousands of firefighters had mobilized to fight fires across the southeast, an area that rarely sees wildfires beyond the end of summer. At least 15 major wildfires across the region had, at the time of this writing, burned in excess of 15,500 acres -- including more than 15,000 acres in Great Smoky Mountains National Park -- and have led to several deaths.
Also in November, wildfires were burning across parts of New York, North Dakota and New Hampshire as well.
Welcome to the future of the US, where wildfires will be burning well into winter.

Air
Temperature records across the planet continue to be set at a record pace.

In the US, November saw several stunning examples of this. The mile-high city of Denver, Colorado saw 78 degrees well into November, while Dallas, Texas saw 88 degrees in the middle of that month.
As aforementioned, the Arctic saw stunningly warm temperatures in November, when one day in the latter part of that month several locations saw temperatures spike well over 36 degrees above average.

Meanwhile, global "weirding" continues, as a recent study showed that the polar vortex is shifting due to ACD, which means winters in eastern North America will be longer. The polar vortex is a zone of frigid air that encircles the Arctic and makes its presence known the most during the winter months.

Also in the Arctic, as that region warms, another recently published study showed that more ancient diseases that were buried deep in the permafrost will be released, posing increasing threats to humans and wildlife. Last summer, anthrax killed a 12-year-old boy in a remote area of Siberia, and at least 20 others in Siberia were diagnosed with the disease. (Twenty may not seem like a large number, but bear in mind that this is an extremely lightly populated area.) Scientists are expressing concern over the fact that infectious microorganisms are now emerging from their deep freeze as permafrost across the entire Arctic continues to melt at unprecedented rates.

Lastly, and quite alarmingly, another recent study showed that the planet is far more sensitive to greenhouse gas levels than previously believed. It showed that climate models are likely underestimating how sensitive the planet is, due to the fact that the greenhouse effect will be amplified the more temperatures increase.

This means the pace of ACD is about to accelerate.

Denial and Reality
Almost needless to say, the most important act of denial over the last month was the US electing an ACD denier into the highest office in the country. President-elect Trump now actively threatens to pull the US out of the Paris climate agreements, eviscerate the EPA and appoint fossil-fuel loyalists into key government positions.

Trump has already said he will strip NASA's Earth Science Division, which conducts vast arrays of studies around ACD and its ongoing impacts across the planet, of funding. A member of Trump's cabal is calling the move a crackdown on "politicized science."

Steve Bannon, who has emerged as Trump's chief strategist, has extreme views on many subjects, including ACD, which he calls an elaborate hoax. He refers to renewable energy as "a scam." Bannon is known for helping influence Trump's "views" on ACD and has called environmentalists "greentards" and "totally fucking wrong on climate change."

As is now well known, Trump has claimed that ACD is a "Chinese hoax." Inconveniently for Trump, during the recent UN Climate Summit in Morocco, China's vice foreign minister, Liu Zhenmin, told reporters that Trump is wrong to have accused China of portraying ACD as a "hoax."

 "Look at the history of climate change negotiations, in fact [they were] launched in the late '80s under the administration of Republican President Reagan and George Bush, supported by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)," Liu told reporters, according to Bloomberg and reports from within the Chinese media.

The Republican Party, which continues to remain the only major political party on the planet that denies the reality of ACD, continues to be funded, backed and heavily controlled by the fossil fuel industry, hence its denial of ACD in order to protect profit-making.

Meanwhile, there is more news on the reality front than is even possible to keep up with.

The government of Australia's New South Wales recently unveiled a plan by which it aims to reach zero CO2 emissions by the year 2050 in order to work towards mitigating the worsening impacts of ACD as best as it can. It will do so primarily by making a concerted effort to shift over to renewable energies and increase battery storage capacity.

On a sobering note, a recently published study showed that the average American is responsible for melting 538 square feet of Arctic summer sea ice each year.

The UN's World Meteorological Organization announced in November that the past five years were the hottest ever on record, and that greenhouse gas emissions have increased the risks of extreme weather events by as much as tenfold.

Disturbingly, a recently published study that surveyed more than 250 different plants and animals found that their ability to adapt to changes in rainfall and temperature cannot keep pace with ACD-generated changes in their environments. In short, this means that the climate is changing "too fast" for species, according to the report.

Not that validation from fossil fuel companies is necessary to confirm the reality of ACD, but it is indeed nice to have. On November 1, Simon Henry, the chief financial officer for Shell, the world's second-largest oil company, said demand for oil will begin dropping permanently in the next five to 15 years, according to an article in World Oil. He went on to admit that his company will focus on making money by focusing on natural gas and renewable energy.

To conclude this month's dispatch, it's worth quoting the UN, which in November provided a very apocalyptic vision of the future of ACD, painting a picture of a changed world filled with famine, war and disease.

 "We will grieve over the avoidable human tragedy; the growing numbers of climate refugees hit by hunger, poverty, illness and conflict will be a constant reminder of our failure to deliver," the UN warned, via its Environment Program. The UNEP released a report that predicted the Earth's temperature is already set to increase by up to 3.4C (above the preindustrial temperature baseline) by 2100. This temperature change should take at least tens of thousands of years to occur naturally, but will have been attained by humans in just a little over two centuries.

It is worth remembering that the rapidly increasing global temperature has consistently outpaced even the worst-case predictions by the UN. Predictions of warming that reaches 8C by 2100 have not been uncommon, with some predictions reaching 12C. Bear in mind that humans have never lived on a 3.5C-warmed planet.

 • Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last 10 years, and has won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, among other awards.

His third book, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible, co-written with William Rivers Pitt, is available now on Amazon. HE is also the author of the book, The End of Ice, forthcoming from The New Press. He lives and works in Washington State.

.

Hansen sea level rise update

SUBHEAD: We had all better hope these scientists are wrong about the planet’s future.

By Chris Mooney on 22 March 2016 for  Washington Post -
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/03/22/we-had-all-better-hope-these-scientists-are-wrong-about-the-planets-future/)


Image above: Climatologist James Hansen on the Eleuthera coastal ridge on Nov. 22, 2015, in Eleuthera, Bahamas. Photo by Charles Ommanney. From original article.

An influential group of scientists led by James Hansen, the former NASA scientist often credited with having drawn the first major attention to climate change in 1988 congressional testimony, has published a dire climate study that suggests the impact of global warming will be quicker and more catastrophic than generally envisioned.

The research invokes collapsing ice sheets, violent megastorms and even the hurling of boulders by giant waves in its quest to suggest that even 2 degrees Celsius of global warming above pre-industrial levels would be far too much. Hansen has called it the most important work he has ever done.

The sweeping paper, 52 pages in length and with 19 authors, draws on evidence from ancient climate change or “paleo-climatology,” as well as climate experiments using computer models and some modern observations. Calling it a “paper” really isn’t quite right — it’s actually a synthesis of a wide range of old, and new, evidence.

“I think almost everybody who’s really familiar with both paleo and modern is now very concerned that we are approaching, if we have not passed, the points at which we have locked in really big changes for young people and future generations,” Hansen said in an interview.

The research, appearing Tuesday in the open-access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, has had a long and controversial path to life, having first appeared as a “discussion paper” in the same journal, subject to live, online peer review — a novel but increasingly influential form of scientific publishing.

Hansen first told the news media about the research last summer, before this process was completed, leading to criticism from some journalists and fellow scientists that he might be jumping the gun.

What ensued was a high-profile debate, both because of the dramatic claims and Hansen’s formidable reputation. And his numerous co-authors, including Greenland and Antarctic ice experts and a leader of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were nothing to be sniffed at.

After record downloads for the study and an intense public review process, a revised version of the paper has now been accepted, according to both Hansen and Barbara Ferreira, media and communications manager for the European Geophysical Union, which publishes Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Indeed, the article is now freely readable on the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics website.

The paper, according to Ferreira, was subject to “major revisions in terms of organisation, title and conclusions.” Those came in response to criticisms that can all be read publicly at the journal’s website. The paper also now has two additional authors.

Most notably, perhaps, the editorial process led to the removal of the use of the phrase “highly dangerous,” in the paper’s title, to describe warming the planet by 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The original paper’s title was “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming is highly dangerous.” The final title is “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming could be dangerous.”

But nonetheless, James Hansen’s climate catastrophe scenario now takes its place in the official scientific literature relatively intact. So let’s rehearse that scenario, again, for the record.

Hansen and his colleagues think that major melting of Greenland and Antarctica can not only happen quite fast — leading to as much as several meters of sea level rise in the space of a century, depending on how quickly melt rates double — but that this melting will have dramatic climate change consequences, beyond merely raising sea levels.

That’s because, they postulate, melting will cause a “stratification” of the polar oceans. What this means is that it will trap a pool of cold, fresh meltwater atop the ocean surface, with a warmer ocean layer beneath.

We have actually seen a possible hint of this with the anomalously cold “blob” of ocean water off the southern coast of Greenland, which some have attributed to Greenland’s melting.

Indeed, shortly before the new paper’s publication, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released new recent data on the globe’s temperature that certainly bears a resemblance to what Hansen is talking about.

For not only was the globe at a record warmth overall over the last three months, but it also showed anomalous cool patches in regions that Hansen suspects are being caused by ice melt – below Greenland, and also off the tip of the Antarctic peninsula.

What ensued was a high-profile debate, both because of the dramatic claims and Hansen’s formidable reputation. And his numerous co-authors, including Greenland and Antarctic ice experts and a leader of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were nothing to be sniffed at.

After record downloads for the study and an intense public review process, a revised version of the paper has now been accepted, according to both Hansen and Barbara Ferreira, media and communications manager for the European Geophysical Union, which publishes Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Indeed, the article is now freely readable on the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics website.

The paper, according to Ferreira, was subject to “major revisions in terms of organisation, title and conclusions.” Those came in response to criticisms that can all be read publicly at the journal’s website. The paper also now has two additional authors.

Most notably, perhaps, the editorial process led to the removal of the use of the phrase “highly dangerous,” in the paper’s title, to describe warming the planet by 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The original paper’s title was “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming is highly dangerous.” The final title is “Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming could be dangerous.”

But nonetheless, James Hansen’s climate catastrophe scenario now takes its place in the official scientific literature relatively intact. So let’s rehearse that scenario, again, for the record.

Hansen and his colleagues think that major melting of Greenland and Antarctica can not only happen quite fast — leading to as much as several meters of sea level rise in the space of a century, depending on how quickly melt rates double — but that this melting will have dramatic climate change consequences, beyond merely raising sea levels.

That’s because, they postulate, melting will cause a “stratification” of the polar oceans. What this means is that it will trap a pool of cold, fresh meltwater atop the ocean surface, with a warmer ocean layer beneath. We have actually seen a possible hint of this with the anomalously cold “blob” of ocean water off the southern coast of Greenland, which some have attributed to Greenland’s melting.

Indeed, shortly before the new paper’s publication, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released new recent data on the globe’s temperature that certainly bears a resemblance to what Hansen is talking about.

For not only was the globe at a record warmth overall over the last three months, but it also showed anomalous cool patches in regions that Hansen suspects are being caused by ice melt – below Greenland, and also off the tip of the Antarctic peninsula.

Stratification, the key idea in the new paper, means that warm ocean water would potentially reach the base of ice sheets that sit below sea level, melting them from below (and causing more ice melt and thus, stratification).

It also means, in Hansen’s paper, a slowdown or even eventual shutdown of the overturning circulation in the Atlantic ocean, due to too much freshening in the North Atlantic off and around Greenland, and also a weakening of another overturning circulation in the Southern Ocean.

This, in turn, causes cooling in the North Atlantic region, even as global warming creates a warmer equatorial region. This growing north-south temperature differential, in the study, drives more intense mid-latitude cyclones, or storms.

The study suggests such storms may kick up gigantic oceanic waves, which may even be capable of feats such as hurling boulders in some locations, not unlike the huge rocks seen on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera, which I visited with Hansen and his co-author, geologist Paul Hearty, in November.

These rocks play a key role in the new paper, just as they did in the original study draft. Indeed, long before the current paper, Hearty had documented, in peer-reviewed publications, that Eleuthera’s rocks appear to have come from the ocean and to have been lifted high up onto a coastal ridge.

This appears to have happened during a past warm period, the Eemian, some 120,000 years ago, when the planet was only slightly warmer than today but seas were far higher — but the idea is that something like it could happen again.

The paper contains many ideas and departures, but the key one is its suggestion of the possibility of greater sea level rise in this century than forecast by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“The models that were run for the IPCC report did not include ice melt,” Hansen said at a news conference regarding the new paper Monday. “And we also conclude that most models, ours included, have excessive small scale mixing, and that tends to limit the effect of this freshwater lens on the ocean surface from melting of Greenland and Antarctica.”

There is a great deal at stake. Hansen has cited the paper in court proceedings in a case playing out in Oregon, where a series of young plaintiffs, including his granddaughter Sophie, are suing the United States for violating their constitutional rights by allowing fossil fuel burning.

While scientists will have to digest the new version of the paper, when the initial draft paper was released, at the website of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions, it prompted both scientific praise and also major skepticism.

David Archer, a geoscientist at the University of Chicago and a reviewer for the first round of the paper, called it “another Hansen masterwork of scholarly synthesis, modeling virtuosity, and insight, with profound implications.” But Peter Thorne, another official reviewer and a climate researcher with the National University of Ireland Maynooth, wrote that “it is far from certain that the results contended shall match what will happen in the real-world.” Thorne also expressed his “personal discomfort at the paper being openly and actively publicized before the discussion period is complete.”

Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University climate scientist familiar with the original study, said: “Near as I can tell, the issues that caused me concern originally still remain in the revised manuscript.

Namely, the projected amounts of meltwater seem unphysically large, and the ocean component of their model doesn’t resolve key wind-driven current systems (e.g. the Gulf Stream) which help transport heat poleward.

That makes northern hemisphere temperatures in their study too sensitive to changes in the  Atlantic meridional overturning ocean circulation,” the scientific name for the ocean circulation in the Atlantic that, the study suggests, could shut down.

However, another Penn State researcher, glaciologist Richard Alley, said by email that “though this is one paper, it usefully reminds us that large and rapid changes are possible, and it raises important research questions as to what those changes might mean if they were to occur.  But, the paper does not include enough ice-sheet physics to tell us how much how rapidly is how likely.”


Video above: James Hanson speaks on subjects of ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms. From (https://youtu.be/JP-cRqCQRc8).

---

Hawaii ans sea level rise

SUBHEAD: Will our beaches, Waikiki and downtown streets, and the Ewa plain all be under water? Ditto for neighbor islands?

By Ed Wagner on 22 March 2016 in Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2016/03/sea-level-rise-update.html)


Image above: A new report demonstrates the vulnerability of the Oahu coastline from climate change and beach erosion. It estimates the inundation of sea water during a storm surge in Honolulu between Pearl Harbor (right) and Waikiki (left). Red indicates 6 feet of water. From(http://oos.soest.hawaii.edu/pacioos/projects/slr/).

Sea level will rise much sooner and faster, inundating Oahu shorelines, with mega storms driving much larger ocean waves inland. NASA scientist research group states impact of global warming will be quicker and more catastrophic than envisioned.

Will our next generation of residents see our beaches, Waikiki and downtown streets, and the Ewa plain all under water? Ditto for neighbor islands?

With the complete destruction of 33% of Oahu's prime AG land producing 4 to 6 crops a year in EWA, and all covered in concrete and asphalt as the money worshippers want, a massive heat island will be created and massive flooding will occur.

Society has a moral and ethical imperative to make sure that does not happen to those who follow us into the 2nd half of this century and into the 22nd century, but the money idolators and politicians they bribe don't give a hoot about the future, only the present.

How long will it be before the Honolulu mass transit rail system under construction becomes inoperable and abandoned due to flodding of Ewa plain?

Oh, that won't matter because all the profiteers will have gotten all their money and moved on, leaving taxpayers holding the bag.

What do you think those superstorms are going to do to land-based and sea-based wind turbines?

This is NOT the time to buy a beach front home or a home anywhere in Ewa. Report above demonstrates the vulnerability of the Oahu coastline from climate change and beach erosion.

Rising seas could displace Ewa residents 
From (http://www.civilbeat.com/2016/03/rising-seas-could-displace-thousands-of-ewa-beach-residents/)

Another good report below from University of Hawaii School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) concerning Human carbon release rate is unprecedented in the past 66 million years of Earth's history.

Unprecedented human carbon release rate
From (http://manoa.hawaii.edu/news/article.php?aId=7771)

.

Is it time to switch to climate panic?

SUBHEAD: James Schlesinger once said "people have only two modes of operation - complacency and panic."

By Ugo Bardi on 15 March 2016 for Cassandra's Legacy -
(http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/the-climate-emergency-time-to-switch-to.html)


Image above: Photograph of one of many giant methane craters found in Siberia - a bad sign for Earth's current climate. From (http://www.scoopnest.com/user/p_hannam/586075754556829696).

James Schlesinger once uttered one of those profound truths that explain a lot of what we see around us: it was: "people have only two modes of operation: complacency and panic."

So far, we have been in the "complacency" mode of operation in regard to climate change: it doesn't exist, if exist it is not a problem, if it is a problem, it is not our fault, and anyway doing something about it would be too expensive to be worth doing. But the latest temperature data are nothing but spine-chilling.

What are we seeing? Is this just a sort of a rebound from the so-called "pause"? Or something much more worrisome? We may be seeing something that portends a major switch in the climate system; an unexpected acceleration of the rate of change.

There are reasons to be worried, very worried: the CO2 emissions seem to have peaked, but that didn't generate a slowdown of the rate of increase of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. If nothing else, it is growing faster than ever. And then there is the ongoing methane spike and, as you know, methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

What's happening? Nobody can say for sure, but these are not good symptoms; not at all. And that may be a good reason to switch to panic mode.

The problem is that societies; specifically in the form called "states" do not normally show much intelligence in their behavior, especially when they are in a state of panic. One of the reasons is that states are normally ruled by psychopaths whose attitude is based on a set of simple rules, mainly involving intimidation or violence, or both.

But it is not just a question of psychopaths in power; the whole society reacts to threats like a psychopath: with the emphasis on doing "something", without much concern about whether it is the right thing to do and what would the consequences could be. So, if climate starts to be perceived as a real and immediate threat, we may expect a reaction endowed with all the strategic finesse of a street brawl: "you hit me - I hit you."

A possible, counterintuitive, panic reaction might be of "doubling down" in the denial of the threat. That could lead to actions such as actively suppressing the diffusion of data and studies about climate; de-funding climate research, closing down climate research centers, marginalizing those who believe that climate is a problem; for instance classifying them among "terrorists."

All that is already happening in some degree and it may well become the next craze, in particular if the coming US elections will handle the presidency to an active climate denier. That would mean hard times for at least a few years for everyone who is trying to do something against climate change. And, perhaps, it would mean the total ruin of the Earth's ecosystem.

The other possibility is to switch all the way to the other extreme and fight climate change with the same methods used to fight terrorism; that is, bombing it into submission.

Of course, you cannot bomb the earth's climate into submission, but the idea of forcing the ecosystem to behave the way we want is the basic concept of "geoengineering".

In the world of environmentalism, geoengineering enjoys more or less the same reputation that Saddam Hussein enjoyed in the Western press in the 1990s. That's for good reasons: geoengineering is often a set of ideas that go from the dangerous to the impossible, all ringing of desperation.

For a good idea of how exactly desperate these ideas can be, just take a look at the results of a recent study on the idea of pumping huge amounts of seawater on top of the Antarctic ice sheet in order to prevent sea level rise. If it were a science fiction novel, you'd say it is too silly to be worth reading.

However, it may be appropriate to start familiarizing with the idea that geoengineering might be the next world craze. And, perhaps, it is better to take the risk of doing something that could go wrong than to do nothing, considering that we have been doing nothing so far.

Don't forget that there are also good forms of geoengineering, for instance the form called "biosphere regeneration." It is based on reforestation, fighting desertification, regenerative agriculture and the like.

Removing some CO2 from the atmosphere by transforming it into plants can't do too much damage, although it cannot be enough to solve the problem. But it may stimulate also other fields of action against climate change; from adaptation to switching to reneable energy. Maybe there is still hope..... maybe.



Image above: NASA Chart of temperature since 1880 show recent spike. Reports of a giant methane craters found in Siberia - bad sign for Earth's current climate. From original article.

.

Climate Change Summary

SUBHEAD: If you want to know how bad climate change is, then is read on. But you may rather not know.

By Guy McPherson on 1 December 2015 for Nature Bats Last -
(http://guymcpherson.com/2014/01/climate-change-summary-and-update/)


Image above: Photo of open mine digging machine illustrating the climate change poem "Extinction" below by Jackie Kay. From (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/15/a-climate-change-poem-for-today-extinction-by-jackie-kay).

We closed the borders, folks, we nailed it.
No trees, no plants, no immigrants.
No foreign nurses, no Doctors; we smashed it.
We took control of our affairs. No fresh air.
No birds, no bees, no HIV, no Poles, no pollen.
No pandas, no polar bears, no ice, no dice.
No rainforests, no foraging, no France.
No frogs, no golden toads, no Harlequins.
No Greens, no Brussels, no vegetarians, no lesbians.
No lions, no tigers, no bears.
No BBC picked audience.
No loony lefties, please.
No politically correct classes.
No classes.
No Guardian readers.
No readers.
No emus, no EUs, no Eco warriors, no Euros,
No rhinos, no zebras, no burnt bras, no elephants.
We shut it down!
No immigrants, no immigrants.
No sniveling-recycling-global-warming nutters.
Little man, little woman, the world is a dangerous place.
Now, pour me a pint, dear. Get out of my fracking face.

[IB Editor's note: The following is just for beginning of Guy McPherson's summary and update of the scientific community's knowledge of the processes involved in Climate Change due to Global Warming due primarily to CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels. It is a long article accumulating information for this past year. Given the importance of humanity coming to grips with the issues and the current COP21 conference in Paris we decided to provide access to this information. It is scary. We have not reposted one of Guy's articles on this website in a long time because they are sooo grim. Even he sees a need for some warning.  Each page of his website recommends "Contemplating Suicide? Please Read This". We advise you to enter at your own psychic risk. If you really want to keep up on this stuff revisit the original page for updates. (http://guymcpherson.com/2014/01/climate-change-summary-and-update/)]

[Author's note: ** Latest additions are flagged with two asterisks on each side. ** To access only the latest information (on most browsers), use CTRL-F, type two asterisks into the “find” box, and hit “Return” or “Enter.” Note that this essay has grown from a few thousand words in January 2013 to the current massive missive. Happy reading.]

I’m often accused of cherry picking the information in this ever-growing essay. I plead guilty, and explain myself in this essay posted 30 January 2014. My critics tend to focus on me and my lack of standing in the scientific community, to which I respond with the words of John W. Farley: “The scientific case is not dependent on citation of authority, no matter how distinguished the authority may be. The case is dependent upon experimental evidence, logic, and reason.” In other words, stop targeting the messenger.

A German-language version of this essay, updated 26 June 2014, is available in pdf form here. A Russian version focused on self-reinforcing feedback loops, courtesy of Robin Westenra and colleagues, is here. A Polish version, updated often, is available here.

American actress Lily Tomlin is credited with the expression, “No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.” With respect to climate science, my own efforts to stay abreast are blown away every week by new data, models, and assessments. It seems no matter how dire the situation becomes, it only gets worse when I check the latest reports.
 
The response of politicians, heads of non-governmental organizations, and corporate leaders remains the same, even though they surely know everything in this essay. They’re mired in the dank Swamp of Nothingness. Margaret Beckett, former U.K. foreign secretary said in September 2008 on BBC America television, with respect to climate change:

“Will it harm our children? Will it harm our grandchildren? Actually, it’s a problem for us today.” As Halldor Thorgeirsson, a senior director with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said on 17 September 2013: “We are failing as an international community. We are not on track.”

These are the people who know about, and presumably could do something about, our ongoing race to disaster (if only to sound the alarm). Tomlin’s line is never more germane than when thinking about their pursuit of a buck at the expense of life on Earth.

Worse than the aforementioned trolls are the media. Fully captured by corporations and the corporate states, the media continue to dance around the issue of climate change. Occasionally a forthright piece is published, but it generally points in the wrong direction, such as suggesting climate scientists and activists be killed (e.g., James Delingpole’s 7 April 2013 hate-filled article in the Telegraph). Leading mainstream outlets routinely mislead the public.

Mainstream scientists minimize the message at every turn, with expected results. As we’ve known for years, scientists almost invariably underplay climate impacts (James Hansen referred to the phenomenon at “scientific reticence” in his 24 May 2007 paper about sea-level rise in Environmental Research Letters).

And in some cases, scientists are aggressively muzzled by their governments. Britain’s Royal Society began actively ignoring observational science about Arctic methane in 2014. Canada no longer allows some climate-change information into the public realm (and see this report from 20 August 2015.

Even museums are not safe from misinformation about climate science to appease fossil-fuel philanthropists, as reported in the 17 June 2014 issue of AlterNet. I’m not implying conspiracy among scientists. Science selects for conservatism. Academia selects for extreme conservatism.

These folks are loathe to risk drawing undue attention to themselves by pointing out there might be a threat to civilization.

Never mind the near-term threat to our entire species (most couldn’t care less about other species). If the truth is dire, they can find another, not-so-dire version.

The concept is supported by an article in the February 2013 issue of Global Environmental Change pointing out that climate-change scientists routinely underestimate impacts “by erring on the side of least drama” (also see overviews of this phenomenon from 21 May 2014 and from 15 July 2014, the latter from the U.S. National Research Council as reported by Truth-out). Even the often-conservative Robert Scribbler points out in his 18 July 2014 essay:

“NASA’s CARVE study has been silent for a year, the University of Maryland has stopped putting out publicly available AIRS methane data measures, the NOAA ESRL methane flask measures, possibly due to lack of funding, haven’t updated since mid-May, and even Gavin Schmidt over at NASA GISS appears to have become somewhat mum on a subject that, of late, has generated so much uncomfortable controversy."

Apocalypse 4 Real blog responded to Scribbler on 24 July 2014, and the response is linked here.) Schmidt increased his efforts to discredit the work of other scientists in early October 2014 with unfounded, unprofessional behavior.

His insanity was made apparent in an interview for the August 2015 issue of Esquire with a single sentence: “There’s no actual evidence that anything dramatically different is going on in the Arctic, other than the fact that it’s melting pretty much everywhere.”

In addition, the consolidation of the scientific publishing industry is accelerating, with expected, profit-based results. A paper published in the 10 June 2015 issue of PLoS One based on 45 million documents indexed in the Web of Science over the period 1973-2013 found that the top five most prolific publishers account for more than half of recent papers published.

Almost everybody reading these words has a vested interest in not wanting to think about climate change, which helps explain why the climate-change deniers have won. They’ve been aided and funded by the fossil-fuel industry, the memos from which “reveal decades of disinformation—a deliberate campaign to deceive the public that continues even today,” according to an in-depth analysis from the Union of Concerned Scientists in July 2015.

Investigative journalist Lee Fang, writing for The Intercept on 25 August 2015, uncovers a relationship between climate-denying attorney Christopher Horner and big coal. Horner is an attorney who claims that the earth is cooling, is known within the scientific community for hounding climate change researchers with relentless investigations and public ridicule, and he often derides scientists as “communists” and frauds.

Horner is a regular guest on Fox News and CNN, and has been affiliated with a number of think tanks and legal organizations over the last decade. He has called for investigations of climate scientists affiliated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and NASA, and inundated climate researchers at major universities across the country with records requests that critics say are designed to distract them from their work.

The 20 August 2015 bankruptcy filing of Alpha Natural Resources, one of the largest coal companies in America, includes line items for all of the corporation’s contractors and grant recipients. Among them are Horner individually at his home address, as well as the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, where he is a senior staff attorney.

It’s not only the scientists who underestimate the damage. It’s the science itself, too. Consider, for example, information derived from satellites which, according to a March 2015 paper in Journal of Climate, significantly underestimate temperature of the middle troposphere. “In short, the Earth is warming, the warming is amplified in the troposphere, and those who claim otherwise are unlikely to be correct.”

Beyond Linear Change
I’m often told Earth can’t possibly be responsive enough to climate change to make any difference to us. But, as the 27 May 2014 headline at Skeptical Science points out, “Rapid climate changes more deadly than asteroid impacts in Earth’s past.” That’s correct: climate change is more deadly than asteroids.

Ever late to the party, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admits global warming is irreversible without geoengineering in a report released 27 September 2013. The IPCC is among the most conservative scientific bodies on the planet, and their reports are “significantly ‘diluted’ under political pressure.”

On 22 April 2014, Truth-out correctly headlines their assessment, “Intergovernmental Climate Report Leaves Hopes Hanging on Fantasy Technology.” Time follows up two days later with a desperate headline, “NASA Chief: Humanity’s Future Depends On Mission To Mars” (first up: greenhouses on Mars).

As pointed out in the 5 December 2013 issue of Earth System Dynamics, known strategies for geoengineering are unlikely to succeed (“climate geo-engineering cannot simply be used to undo global warming“). “Attempts to reverse the impacts of global warming by injecting reflective particles into the stratosphere could make matters worse,” according to research published in the 8 January 2014 issue of Environmental Research Letters.

In addition, as described in the December 2013 issue of Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, geoengineering may succeed in cooling the Earth, it would also disrupt precipitation patterns around the world.

Furthermore, “risk of abrupt and dangerous warming is inherent to the large-scale implementation of SRM” (solar radiation management), as pointed out in the 17 February 2014 issue of Environmental Research Letters. About a week later comes this line from research published in the 25 February 2014 issue of Nature Communication: “schemes to minimize the havoc caused by global warming by purposefully manipulating Earth’s climate are likely to either be relatively useless or actually make things worse.”

Finally, in a blow to technocrats published online in the 25 June 2014 issue of Nature Climate Change, a large and distinguished group of international researchers concludes geo-engineering will not stop climate change. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences piles on with a report issued 10 February 2015, concluding geoengineering is not a viable solution for the climate predicament.

An analysis in Europe reached the same conclusion in an assessment published 16 July 2015. As it turns out, the public isn’t impressed, either: Research published in the 12 January 2014 issue of Nature Climate Change “reveals that the overall public evaluation of climate engineering is negative.” Despite pervasive American ignorance about science, the public correctly interprets geo-engineering in the same light as the scientists, and contrary to the techno-optimists.

Unimpressed with evidence and public opinion, some scientists forge on, illustrating that the progressive perspective often means progresssing toward the cliff’s edge. As reported in the 27 November 2014 issue of New Scientist, initial efforts to cool the planet via geo-engineering have taken shape and might begin in two years.

The IPCC operates with a very conservative process and produces very conservative reports for several reasons, among them the failure to include relevant self-reinforcing feedback loops (as pointed out in the 1 April 2015 issue of the Washington Post).

And then governments of the world meddle with the reports to ensure Pollyanna outcomes, as reported by a participant in the process (also see Nafeez Ahmed’s 14 May 2014 report in the Guardian and the 3 July 2014 paper in National Geographic).

According to David Wasdell’s May 2014 analysis, which includes a critique of the IPCC’s ongoing lunacy, “equilibrium temperature increase predicted as a result of current concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gasses is already over 5°C.” I see no way for humans to survive such a rise in global-average temperature.

**  Wasdell’s analysis from September 2015 includes several noteworthy conclusions:

1. “Current computer estimates of Climate Sensitivity are shown to be dangerously low,” revealing
   
2. “an eight-fold amplification of CO₂ forcing (in contrast to the three-fold amplification predicted by the IPCC climate modelling computer ensemble),
   
3. “the 2°C target temperature limit is set far too high” (emphasis in original), and
   
4. “anthropogenic change is at least 100 times faster than at any time in the Paleo record.” The report’s bottom line: “There is no available carbon budget. It is already massively overspent, even for the 2°C target.” **

Once again the original article is here for more...

---

What came before infinity?

By Guy McPherson on 29 November 2015 for Nature Bats Last -
(http://guymcpherson.com/2015/11/if-you-want-to-know-what-came-before-infinity-then-you-dont-understand-infinity/)

Not so long ago, humans believed the watershed was everything. Their world was restricted to a tiny area, and traveling beyond the area was undesirable — even dangerous. But some daring traveler took the leap and discovered a world beyond the watershed.

Rinse and repeat, from the watershed to the continent, from the continent to the world, from the world to the solar system, from the solar system to the galaxy, from the galaxy to the universe. If the Church hadn’t killed a few daring travelers along the way, we’d have discovered a lot more a lot sooner. Call it the collateral damage of controlling the empire.

Human discovery represents a continuum, with our part diminishing along the way. The world was large, but we were large, too. Discoveries and our ability to travel made the world smaller. And then the solar system, and so on, so that now we’ve explained the universe in physical terms and we understand our inconsequential role (and our hubris, which is quite consequential).

Religious believers like to believe we’re special, that Somebody is watching over us. And they use the most stunning logic to explain the notion of Somebody: Science only explains our universe back to the Big Bang. What about before then? And what caused the Bang, and all the matter associated with it? It must have come from something. By which they mean Somebody.
As if pointing to Somebody explains it all.

Stephen B. Hawking tried to explain the idea of a singularity to the lay public in his dreadfully incomprehensible 1988 book, A Brief History of Time. I suspect this was one of the most-purchased, least-read books of all time.

Needless to say, Hawking’s prose failed to provide an explanation convincing to the masses. But here’s the bottom line: Universes come and go, and they collapse and arise in events called singularities.

Fast-forward to the Russian physicist Alex Vilenkin and his 2006 book, Many Worlds in One. Vilenkin explains that ours is one of many universes — an infinite number, in fact. If you buy the evidence behind an expanding universe (which is overwhelming), then it’s a short, simple, and logical step to ours being one of an infinite number of universes. We’re part of the multiverse. The continuum rolls on.

Most universes likely blink out as quickly as they arise. They persist only a few nanoseconds, and fail to produce even a single flower. Some of these universes, such as ours, are relatively stable. They persist long enough, and have sufficient initial conditions, that life arises. Eventually, intelligent life arises, if you’re willing to stretch the definition far enough. Count up all these universes, come to terms with the concept of infinity, and you’ve got an infinite number of Guy McPhersons typing these words now.

This explanation accounts for all matter, and all energy, for all universes, for all time. Thus, it explains our universe, and the universes that preceded ours, and so on, back to infinity ago (and also from now until infinity).

Many of you are thinking, “Yeah, but what about before that?” If you want to know what came before infinity, then you don’t understand infinity.

Since the brains of most of us are somewhat smaller than infinity, religious believers will never admit that physical processes might explain more about the universe — or even the multiverse — than that “explanation” to trump all explanations, “Somebody did it. Somebody big and mysterious that we’ll never understand.” Somebody like Gawd, Yahweh, the Great Spirit, or the unicorn on the dark side of the moon.

But invoking Somebody is choosing to remain ignorant. That’s a personal choice, of course, and I’m happy to let religious believers keep believing instead of thinking. Especially if they let me think. It’d be even better if they encouraged their children to think, but apparently that’s asking too much.

It’s pretty demoralizing to think there are an infinite number of Earths dealing with peak oil and runaway greenhouse by promoting destruction and ignorance. But it’s pretty cool to think that there are an infinite number of planet Earths that produced humans with empathy, compassion, and creativity.

On these Earths, humans persist a very long time and humbly share the planet with many other species.

On these Earths, there is no runaway greenhouse. Passing the planetary oil peak is a cause for celebration because, on these Earths, the demise of cheap oil doesn’t spell the end of civilization and the likely demise of four-fifths of the humans on Earth.

• Catch Nature Bats Last on the radio with Mike Sliwa and Guy McPherson. To catch us live, tune in every Tuesday at 3:00 p.m. Eastern time, or catch up in the archives here. If you prefer the iTunes version, including the option to subscribe, you can click here.

.